come outside
the door and stand for a minute looking at me, over there by the
fringe of the woods, where I was putting my back into felling the
birches and the spruce to make a patch of soil for her.

"Then in the month of July our well must needs dry up; the cows had
not a drop of water to slake their thirst and they almost stopped
giving milk. So when I was hard at it in the woods the mother went
off to the river with a pail in either hand, and climbed the steep
bluff eight or ten times together with these brimming, and her feet
that slipped back in the running sand, till she had filled a barrel;
and when the barrel was full she got it on a wheelbarrow, and
wheeled it off herself to empty it into the big tub in the
cow-pasture more than three hundred yards from the house, just below
the rocks. It was not a woman's work, and I told her often enough to
leave it to me, but she always spoke up briskly:--'Don't you think
about that--don't think about anything--clear a farm for me.' And
she would laugh to cheer me up, but I saw well enough this was too
much for her, and that she was all dark under the eyes with the
labour of it.

"Well, I caught up my ax and was off to the woods; and I laid into
the birches so lustily that chips flew as thick as your wrist, all
the time saying to myself that the wife I had was like no other, and
that if the good God only kept me in health I would make her the
best farm in the countryside."

The rain was ever sounding on the roof now and then a gust drove
against the window great drops which ran down the panes like
slow-falling tears. Yet a few hours of rain and the soil would be
bare, streams would dance down every slope; a few more days and they
would hear the thundering of the falls.

"When we took up other land above Mistassini," Samuel Chapdelaine
continued, "it was the same thing over again; heavy work and
hardship for both of us alike; but she was always full of courage
and in good heart ... We were in the midst of the forest, but as
there were some open spaces of rich grass among the rocks we took to
raising sheep. One evening He was silent for a little, and when he
began speaking again his eyes were fixed intently upon Maria, as
though he wished to make very clear to her what he was about to say.

"It was in September; the time when all the great creatures of the
woods become dangerous. A man from Mistassini who was coming down
the river in a canoe landed near our place and s